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Children Reading Pictures Interpreting Visual Texts 1st
Edition Evelyn Arizpe Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Evelyn Arizpe
ISBN(s): 9780415275774, 0203005155
Edition: 1st
File Details: PDF, 2.28 MB
Year: 2002
Language: english
Children Reading Pictures

This book describes the fascinating results of a two-year study of chil-

dren’s responses to contemporary picturebooks. Children of primary
school age, from a range of backgrounds, read and discussed books by
the award-winning artists Anthony Browne and Satoshi Kitamura.
They then made their own drawings in response to the books.
The authors found that children are sophisticated readers of visual
texts, and are able to make sense of complex images on literal, visual
and metaphorical levels. They are able to understand different view-
points, analyse moods, messages and emotions, and articulate personal
responses to picturebooks – even when they struggle with the written
word.
With colour illustrations, and interviews with the two authors
whose books were included in the study, this book demonstrates how
important visual literacy is to children’s understanding and develop-
ment. Primary and early years teachers, literacy co-ordinators and all
those interested in children’s literature will find this a captivating read.

Evelyn Arizpe is a freelance researcher attached to the Faculty of

Education, University of Cambridge. Morag Styles is a Senior Lecturer
at the University of Cambridge and Reader in Children’s Literature at
Homerton College, Cambridge.
Children Reading Pictures

Interpreting visual texts

Evelyn Arizpe
and Morag Styles

With contributions from

Helen Bromley, Kathy Coulthard
and Kate Rabey
This book is dedicated to our children – Flora and
Isabel Leask and Ross Styles

First published 2003

by RoutledgeFalmer
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by RoutledgeFalmer
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2003 Morag Styles and Evelyn Arizpe, apart from Chapter 6,
Kate Rabey; Chapter 7, Helen Bromley; Chapter 8, Kathy
Coulthard
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Styles, Morag.
Children reading pictures: interpreting visual texts / Morag Styles
and Evelyn Arizpe; with contributions from Helen Bromley, Kathy
Coulthard and Kate Rabey.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Visual learning. 2. Pictures in education. 3. Children–Books and
reading. I. Arizpe, Evelyn. II. Title.

LB1067.5 .S79 2002

371.33'5–dc21 2002026983

ISBN 0-203-00515-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–27576–8 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–27577–6 (pbk)
Contents

List of illustrations vii

Notes on contributors ix
Preface: a personal preamble by Morag Styles x
Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction: contexts and methodologies 1

PART I
Definitions, processes and models 17

1 The nature of picturebooks: theories about

visual texts and readers 19

2 Visual literacy – processes, frameworks and

models: towards a developmental theory of
response to visual texts 39

PART II
Looking and seeing – children responding
to picturebooks 53

3 On a walk with Lily and Satoshi Kitamura:

how children link words and pictures along the way 55

4 A gorilla with ‘grandpa’s eyes’: how children

interpret ironic visual texts – a case study of
Anthony Browne’s Zoo 77
vi Contents

5 ‘Letting the story out’: visual encounters

with Anthony Browne’s The Tunnel 97

6 Thinking aloud: looking at children

drawing in response to picturebooks 117
K AT E R A B E Y

PART III
Listening, talking, thinking and learning 145

7 Putting yourself in the picture: a question of talk 147

HELEN BROMLEY

8 ‘The words to say it’: young bilingual

learners responding to visual texts 164
K AT H Y C O U LT H A R D

9 Picturebooks and metaliteracy: children

talking about how they read pictures 190

PART IV
Conclusions 203

10 The artist’s voice: Browne and Kitamura talking pictures 205

11 Conclusions: seeing, thinking and knowing 222

12 Post-script: pedagogical interventions in

the development of visual literacy 243

Afterword 250
A N T H O N Y B R OW N E
Appendices 251
Bibliography 259
Index 266

N.B. All the chapters in this book have been written by Evelyn
Arizpe and Morag Styles unless otherwise indicated
Illustrations

Plate section
1 By Yu (4)
2 From Zoo by Anthony Browne
3 From Zoo by Anthony Browne
4 By Joe (10)
5 From The Tunnel by Anthony Browne
6 By Polly (5)
7 From Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura
8 By Charlie (9)
Figures
3.1 From Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura 60
3.2 From Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura 61
3.3 From Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura 63
3.4 By Charlie (9) 72
4.1 From Zoo by Anthony Browne 87
4.2 From Zoo by Anthony Browne 89
4.3 From Zoo by Anthony Browne 92
5.1 From The Tunnel by Anthony Browne 101
6.1 By Amy (4) 119
6.2 By Seamus (7) 120
6.3 By Will (9) 121
6.4 By Sara (4) 122
6.5 By Christina (8) 123
6.6 By Bobby (8) 124
6.7 By Ashok (4) 125
6.8 By Anne (9) 126
6.9 By Erin (7) 128
6.10 By Sally (10) 130
viii Illustrations

6.11 By Belinda (10) 131

6.12 Unsigned drawing 132
6.13 By Louis (4) 135
6.14 By Jane (5) 136
6.15 By Jane (5) 137
6.16 By Yu (4) 139
6.17 By Yu (4) 142
6.18 By Yu (4) 142
7.1 From Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura 149
8.1 From The Tunnel by Anthony Browne 166
8.2 By Tosin (6) 170
9.1 From The Tunnel by Anthony Browne 194
Notes on contributors

Helen Bromley has taught in primary schools for 16 years, latterly as Deputy
Headteacher, before becoming an advisory teacher, then tutor for the
Centre for Language in Primary Education. She is currently a freelance
consultant running courses in literacy, oracy and media texts throughout
the UK. She is working on the links between play, popular culture and
writing for her Ph.D. Publications include Book Based Reading Games
(2001). She writes for journals such as Reading and Cambridge Journal of
Education, as well as contributing chapters to Talking Pictures (Watson and
Styles 1997), Small Screens (Buckingham 2002) and Pikachu’s Global
Adventure: Making Sense of the Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Tobin 2002)

Kathy Coulthard is currently an advisor for ethnic minority achievement in

the London borough of Enfield, having previously been a primary teacher
and advisor for English and Assessment. She is author of Scaffolding
Learning in the Multilingual Classroom (1998) and contributes to journals
such as English in Education and Language Matters. She is in demand as a
speaker on teaching and learning in multilingual classrooms.

Kate Robey took a first class degree from Cambridge in Art and Early Years
Education in 1998, then spent three years as a classroom teacher. During
that period, she also worked on projects in art education for the Fitzwilliam
Museum and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. She was one of the organisers of the
exhibition, Picture This!: Picturebook Art at the Millennium at the
Fitzwilliam Museum (2000) and co-author of the catalogue which accom-
panied it. She is now working towards a Ph.D. on visual literacy and as a
researcher for the Young Cultural Creators Project, based at the Tate
Gallery, London. She has contributed to The Cambridge Guide to Children’s
Books in English (Watson 2002) and Teaching Through Texts (Anderson and
Styles 2001).
Preface – a personal preamble
Morag Styles

Art’s most satisfying function is that it allows us to exercise our minds.

(Yenawine 1991: 25)

Learning to look
The first time I read Jan Ormerod’s delightful Chicken Licken, I was so
busy analysing the different levels at which the text was operating that
I completely failed to spot the baby (whose antics form one of the key
narratives in this multi-layered picturebook) until the end of the story.
I have yet to encounter a child who doesn’t notice the baby from the
opening page. For years I have been learning about picturebooks from
children. In most other parts of the curriculum, I felt there was prob-
ably more I could teach children than they could teach me, but every
time I read a visual text with a child (and usually the younger, the
better), they saw things I didn’t. Although I was actively looking for
meaning in every image, the 5-year-old by my side would invariably
point excitedly to a detail I had missed, sometimes engendering a new
reading of a familiar text. Where picturebooks are concerned, in some
significant respects young children are more ahead of the game than
experienced readers.
My belief in children as sophisticated readers of visual texts was
heightened some years ago when I went into my local school to do
some field work for research into picturebooks.1 When I laid out piles
of delectable picturebooks2 in the library which was at the centre of
the school where children passed between lessons, I noticed how many
of the older pupils looked longingly at the books, or begged me to work
with them, or made the sort of ‘Ahhh’ and ‘Mmm’ appreciative noises
that are more suggestive of the sounds children usually make when
encountering delicious food! The picturebooks had an instant
 Preface xi

aesthetic appeal, but was there more to it than that? If I had often been
disappointed in the past at the dismissive and relatively superficial
response of 8–11-year-olds to picturebooks (compared to younger
readers), would this still be true of children at the turn of the millen-
nium who had grown up in a much more visual world and who had
read many picturebooks in their early years of schooling? Or do schools
still place such high value on reading print that illustrated books are
cast aside as early as possible? Was it still likely to be the case that
younger children were more observant of pictures and their meaning
than older pupils? When did the interplay between word and image, a
strong feature of many picturebooks, become more significant? Are
young children capable of sophisticated multi-modal reading? Do
cultural factors make a difference?

The project team

These were some of the questions I was grappling with in 1999 when I
was already busily involved in a project on visual literacy, which
included organising a large international symposium on the subject and
mounting an ambitious exhibition of picturebook artists at the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. I am not sure what madness
prompted me to take on a third strand of the Reading Pictures Project
by asking the Arts and Humanities Research Board for a study leave to
investigate how children read images in picturebooks, but that is what
I did. It is due to the generosity of AHRB and Homerton College that
this investigation became a reality.
I did, however, have the sense to realise I couldn’t do all of this
myself and was lucky enough to tempt Evelyn Arizpe to be joint
convenor. We have collaborated closely throughout the research,
though Evelyn has had to hold the threads together at various times
when I was burdened with other parts of the project. During the course
of our work, Evelyn keenly observed her eldest daughter, Isabel’s,
response to visual texts. When Evelyn became pregnant with her
second child, Flora, who at the time of writing this book is 2 years old,
she developed these observations into a literacy journal of her daugh-
ters. These two girls were present at some of our meetings (mercifully
asleep!) and seemed part of the project from the outset, so we have
taken advantage of Evelyn’s occasional notes on very young children as
readers of image.
In the fullness of time, we recruited some talented teacher/
researchers to work with us. Kate Rabey had recently gained a first
xii Preface

class degree at the University of Cambridge in Fine Art and Education

and had distinguished herself in the final year children’s literature
course, particularly for her work on picturebooks. Kate was teaching 4-
and 5-year-olds in a local Cambridge school that was perfect for inclu-
sion in our study. She brought a knowledge of art and an understanding
of young children and their drawings to the project that was to prove
invaluable.
Kathy Coulthard and I had been friends since we had taken a course
on reading together in the early 1980s and we had always wanted an
excuse to work together. Now that she was working as an advisor for
ethnic minority achievement in a north London borough, it made her
the perfect choice to join the project with her colleague, Janet
Campbell, choosing schools well known to them in Enfield. Kathy and
Janet brought their immense experience of working with teachers and
pupils in multi-ethnic settings to our study. Their insightful comments
and commitment were all the more remarkable given their incredibly
busy schedules at the time.
The final member of the group was Helen Bromley, who had distin-
guished herself on our Advanced Diploma in Language and Literature
some years before and had since been in great demand as a speaker
with a particular interest in reading, media texts and oracy. Helen had
also been working at the Centre for Language in Primary Education
and, although battling with a debilitating illness at the time, her
refreshing enthusiasm for the project and the quality of her contribu-
tion made her a valued member of the team. Helen’s research took
place in a school in Essex.

Lessons for teachers?

We are living in a golden age of picturebooks today. The sheer talent
of so many picturebook artists, the quality, variety and sophistication of
output is quite extraordinary and, I think, too much taken for granted.
Most teachers enjoy reading these texts to children and story-time is
now an established part of the early years curriculum in Britain and, I
suspect, in many classrooms all over the world where there is the
funding and the access to fine picturebooks. Furthermore, we live in an
increasingly visual world where it is widely held to be the case that
image is superseding the word as the dominant means of communica-
tion. Most contemporary children who are lucky enough to have access
to videos, computers and electronic games are masters of their range
and repertoire, amazing their ham-fisted elders with their skill and
 Preface xiii

poise. This combination of (1) the availability of a wide range of excel-

lent picturebooks; (2) their popularity with teachers and pupils as part
of essential classroom practices, now well established; and (3) the
dominance of image in all our lives today, suggested to us that children
might be very sophisticated readers of image.
Sadly, this skill of visual literacy is not widely understood or
exploited in our educational system. In England and Wales, where we
have had a National Curriculum for nearly 15 years, although picture-
books are seen as the main literary texts for children before the age of 6
or 7, pictorial cues are not included as one of the key skills for learning
to read. In fact, visual literacy is not mentioned in the National
Curriculum for Reading. And although there are many picturebooks
which challenge older readers, they are not considered by most
teachers or pupils to be a suitable genre for reading above the age of 7.
Furthermore, in the National Literacy Strategy introduced in the UK
in 1998, the hundreds of pages devoted to the skills that children need
to acquire in order to be literate, plus ideas for how to use these skills
in the classroom, barely mention visual texts. Clearly the results of our
research were likely to have implications for the primary curriculum
and its teaching methods.

Conclusion
In some ways, a metaphor for our research could be that of a simply
equipped, small boat setting out on turbulent seas, often rowing against
the current and finding ourselves on unexpected foreign shores. The
journey was exhilarating and we had a terrific crew; if we did it again,
we might use a finer vessel or steer a different course. Even so, we are
very glad we took this trip in the splendid company of children,
teachers, artists and scholars. We hope our adventures into visual
literacy will prove just as rewarding for the reader.

Notes
1 See chapter 2, Watson and Styles (1996).
2 The picturebooks were by the Ahlbergs, Sendak, Smith and Scieszka,
Burningham, McKee, McNaughton, Kitamura, Browne, Hughes et al.
Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the team (Helen Bromley, Janet
Campbell, Kathy Coulthard and Kate Rabey) for their passionate commit-
ment to the project. Working with such a gifted group of people was often
exhilarating, always enjoyable.
We should also like to thank the seven head teachers and 21 teachers
with whom we worked and to express our appreciation for the warm
welcome we received from the schools in the project. As for the children,
their reactions made all our efforts worthwhile.
Anthony Browne and Satoshi Kitamura were helpful and supportive
throughout the project and we are very grateful for their collaboration.
This project would not have been possible without the study leave
granted by the Arts and Humanities Research Board; it was also helped by
a small grant from the British Academy. Homerton College was a generous
employer in many ways, allowing time and resources for research and
writing. Morag Styles would also like to thank her colleagues at Homerton
College and Cambridge Faculty of Education for their support.
The authors are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce
material: illustrations from Zoo by Anthony Browne, published by Julia
MacRae, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group; illustra-
tions and text from Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura, reprinted by
permission of The Penguin Group; illustrations from The Tunnel copyright
1989 Anthony Browne. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books and
Random House Inc.
On a personal note:
Evelyn Arizpe: warm thanks are due to my husband, Nigel Leask, for his
encouragement and all the support he has given me during the project.
Morag Styles: some special friends have been very important to me
while I was working on this project. You know who you are. Thank you for
everything.
Introduction
Contexts and methodologies

What we see is not simply given, but is the product of past experi-
ence and future expectations.
(Gombrich 1982: 28–9)

Research design and methodology

There have been surprisingly few systematic attempts to ask children
about their reading/viewing of pictorial text in terms of their under-
standing of visual art, and appreciation of artistic techniques and their
implications for the teaching and learning of visual literacy.1 Most
research is limited to particular psychological, linguistic or artistic
development issues, where subjects are tested in a context that may
not have much in common with the setting in which they relate to
pictures. Within the studies that do look at response to pictures in
books, few have focussed on the same picturebook and asked the same
set of questions to children of different ages and in different schools.
Also, few have taken account of the way the child perceives the rela-
tionship between images and words.
The principal aim of our research was to investigate how visual texts
are read by children using the work of well-known picturebook artists.
We wanted to explore the potential of visual literacy and the skills chil-
dren need to deal with visual texts. A subsidiary aim was to identify the
perspectives of the artists, particularly in terms of their perceptions of
how young readers might respond to their work, and to set this alongside
information gathered through the research about the responses of the
young readers themselves. Some of the questions we set ourselves to
explore have not been asked before of readers of different ages. When
confronted with complex picturebooks, how do they understand narra-
tive through pictures? What are the specific skills that young readers
2 Introduction

bring to interpreting visual texts? How do they perceive the relationship

between word and image? How can they best articulate their response?
What is the relationship between thinking and seeing? What is the role
of written text in making sense of image? How does the reading back-
ground of the children affect their viewing? What part do visual texts and
media play in their ability to analyse pictures? Do gender and ethnicity
have an influence on the understanding of image? What do children’s
own drawings reveal about their viewing skills? What do complex
picturebooks teach them about looking? How does talking about a book
in depth, with their peers and with adults, change their responses?
The research design was based on the conclusions of a pilot study
during which various research instruments were refined. The basic
structure was as follows: we worked in seven primary schools serving
varied catchment areas, interviewing two boys and two girls per class
from three different classes per school, one of which was early years,
one lower primary and one upper primary. This meant we worked
closely with twelve children of varying ages in each school, usually
requiring three whole-day visits as well as preliminary conferences with
teachers. We revisited one-third of the sample several months after the
initial interviews.

The schools
Seven primary schools participated in the research, ranging from
multi-ethnic and economically deprived settings in north London to
suburban schools in Essex. The schools were chosen to include those
with differing intakes in terms of social class, though we did not
systematically control for these variables, confining ourselves to
collecting data on the proportion of pupils having free school meals.
All of the schools were to some extent multi-ethnic and multi-
lingual, with the exception of School D in the south east of England,
where the pupils were predominantly white, monolingual speakers of
English. This was in contrast to the London schools, where a whole
spread of ethnic groups could be found, including a large percentage of
refugees from the African and Asian subcontinents. In the schools in
Cambridge, around 20 per cent of the pupils had a second language.

The interviews
In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 84 children
(matched for gender), 21 of whom were followed up in a second inter-
 Introduction 3

School Population Socio-economic information Free school

meals (%)
A 363 City council estate, mainly 22
working class
B 466 Suburban, mixed housing, 7
working/middle class
C 400 City, mixed housing, 12
working/middle class
D 300 Suburban, middle class 9
E 518 Outer London borough, 33
working class (32% ethnic
minority pupils)
F 550 Outer London borough, 30
working class (70% ethnic
minority pupils)
G 898 Outer London borough, 52
mixed housing (40% ethnic
minority pupils)

view. An interview schedule was closely followed, normally 45 minutes

long, with about ten questions common to all interviews and a further
ten which were book specific (these questions can be found in the
Appendix). We began by asking about the appeal of the cover and how
it showed what the picturebook might be about (later in the interviews
we asked if, in retrospect, the covers were right for the books). We
asked children to tell us about each illustration in turn, using specific
and open-ended questions. We invited them to show us their favourite
pictures, to tell us how they read pictures and to talk about the rela-
tionship between words and pictures. We questioned them about the
actions, expressions and feelings of the characters; the intratextual and
intertextual elements; what the artist needed to know in order to draw,
and the ways in which he used colour, body language and perspective
etc. In addition, we took research notes which included reference to
children’s own body language (pointing, gazing, tone of voice, use of
hand, facial expressions) while reading the books.

Group discussions
After the individual interviews, the children participated in a group
discussion with other members of their class who had been inter-
viewed, plus two extra children who had been identified by the teacher
in case of the absence of the interviewees. In total, 126 pupils were
4 Introduction

involved in these discussions, which lasted up to an hour and were

normally conducted later in the same day. During these discussions, the
researchers were free to review interesting issues that had come up in
the interviews, open up new areas for debate and give the children who
had not been interviewed a chance to grapple with the text.

Drawing in response to pictures

We invited the children to draw a picture in response to the text
which had been the focus of the interview. The purpose of the drawing
was to access some of their knowledge which may not have been
verbally articulated during the interviews.2 The researchers provided
materials when necessary and the pupils were allowed time to draw,
either while others were being interviewed, or later in the day. During
the follow-up interviews, the children were asked to do a second
drawing. The drawings are analysed by Kate Rabey in chapter 6.

Revisiting
Preliminary findings indicated that repeated readings of a picturebook
could be an important element in pupils constructing meaning, so we
were interested to find out whether significant changes in interpreta-
tion had occurred some time after the initial research. Accordingly we
decided to carry out follow-up interviews three to six months later with
one fifth of our original sample, i.e. one child from each class. The
children were chosen to represent a range of responses to the first
interviews – from children who had been outstandingly interesting the
first time round, to those who had barely been willing to participate,
from children with specific learning difficulties to those who were
described by their teachers as more or less average readers. In the revis-
iting, the emphasis of the questions changed from detailed
examination of individual pages to a consideration of the book as a
whole.3

Procedures
Five different researchers carried out the interviews in schools. Their
role was to follow the interview schedules as closely as possible, while
allowing for flexibility in following children’s leads and pursuing
further questioning when they thought it appropriate to do so. Analysis
of the transcripts showed that each researcher had their own inter-
 Introduction 5

viewing style which influenced the results in intriguing ways (see

chapter 12). In some cases, particularly when working with young or
bilingual children, the pupil’s willingness and ability to talk deter-
mined the way in which the interview was conducted. Each of the
researchers used their own criteria in deciding which questions or
pictures seemed to elicit the most interesting responses from the inter-
viewees and were free to choose when and where to probe further.

The questionnaire
In order to provide a context against which to set our results, we used a
short questionnaire to find out about the reading habits of the pupils in
the seven schools that participated in the study.4 It invited information
on their favourite picturebooks, television programmes, videos and
computer games. It was also a way of finding out whether they were
familiar with the picturebooks used in our research. A total of 486 chil-
dren from Reception to Year 6 (ages 4 to 11) answered the
questionnaire, which provided us with a glimpse of the reading back-
grounds of pupils as well as of their interests by age and gender.5

Data analysis
The amount of data resulting from the interviews and discussions was
considerable and required many careful readings.6 The transcripts from
the initial and the follow-up interviews were analysed qualitatively,
partially employing a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss
1967 and Strauss 1987), but also using codes derived from previous
studies on response to text (for example Thomson 1987). We also took
into account the data analysis carried out by two of the most system-
atic studies on response to picturebooks – Kiefer (1993) and Madura
(1998).7 Kiefer developed categories and subcategories of response
according to four of Halliday’s functions of language: informative,
heuristic, imaginative and personal. Madura takes Kiefer’s framework
into account but grouped responses to the particular books she used
into three main categories: descriptive, interpretive and the identifica-
tion of thematic trends.8
Although we found these categories useful, both as analytical tools
and as a means of corroborating our findings, we developed codes from
our own data which were successively modified through further analy-
sis. In order to facilitate this analysis, oral response was divided into
two groups – although it is clear that these groups are closely linked.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
overtaking him, we make comfortably sure that religion lends itself as
deftly as journalism to the light-hearted drolleries of the cruel.
Novelists, who understand how easy a thing it is to gratify our
humorous susceptibilities, venture upon doubtful jests. Mr.
Tarkington knows very well that the spectacle of a boy dismembering
an insect calls for reprobation; but that if the boy’s experiments can
be described as “infringing upon the domain of Dr. Carrell,” they
make a bid for laughter. “Penrod’s efforts—with the aid of a pin—to
effect a transference of living organism were unsuccessful; but he
convinced himself forever that a spider cannot walk with a beetle’s
legs.” It is funny to those who relish the fun. If it does not, as Mr.
Pater advises, make suffering ridiculous, it makes sympathy
ridiculous, as being a thing more serious than the occasion warrants.
The reader who is not amused tries to forget the incident, and
hurries cheerfully on.
A more finished example of callous gaiety, and one which has
been more widely appreciated, may be found in a story called
“Crocker’s Hole,” by Blackmore. It tells how a young man named
Pike, whom “Providence” had created for angling (the author is
comfortably sure on this point), caught an old and wary trout by the
help of a new and seductive bait. The over-wrought, over-coloured
beauty of Blackmore’s style is in accord with his highly sophisticated
sense of humour:
“The lover of the rose knows well a gay, voluptuous beetle, whose
pleasure it is to lie embedded in a fount of beauty. Deep among the
incurving petals of the blushing fragrance he loses himself in his joys
till a breezy waft reveals him. And when the sunlight breaks upon his
luscious dissipation, few would have the heart to oust such a gem
from such a setting. All his back is emerald sparkles; all his front, red
Indian gold, and here and there he grows white spots to save the
eye from aching. Pike slipped in his finger, fetched him out, and gave
him a little change of joys by putting a Limerick hook through his
thorax, and bringing it out between his elytra. Cetonia aurata liked it
not, but pawed the air very naturally, fluttered his wings, and trod
prettily upon the water under a lively vibration. He looked quite as
happy, and considerably more active than when he had been cradled
in the anthers of a rose.”
The story is an angling story, and it would be unreasonable to spoil
it by sympathizing with the bait. But there is something in the
painting of the little beetle’s beauty, and in the amused description of
its pain, which would sicken a donkey-beating costermonger, if he
were cultivated enough to know what the author was driving at. It
takes education and an unswerving reverence for sport to save us
from the costermonger’s point of view.
There are times when it is easier to mock than to pity; there are
occasions when we may be seduced from blame, even if we are not
won all the way to approval. Mrs. Pennell tells us in her very
interesting and very candid life of Whistler that the artist gratified a
grudge against his Venetian landlady by angling for her goldfish
(placed temptingly on a ledge beneath his window-sill); that he
caught them, fried them, and dropped them dexterously back into
their bowl. It is a highly illustrative anecdote, and we are more
amused than we have any business to be. Mr. Whistler’s method of
revenge was the method of the Irish tenants who hocked their
landlord’s cattle; but the adroitness of his malice, and the whimsical
picture it presents, disarms sober criticism. A sympathetic setting for
such an episode would have been a comedy played in the streets of
Mantua, under the gay rule of Francesco Gonzaga, and before the
eyes of that fair Isabella d’Este who bore tranquilly the misfortunes of
others.
We hear so much about the sanitary qualities of laughter, we have
been taught so seriously the gospel of amusement, that any writer,
preacher, or lecturer, whose smile is broad enough to be infectious,
finds himself a prophet in the market-place. Laughter, we are told,
freshens our exhausted spirits and disposes us to good-will,—which
is true. It is also true that laughter quiets our uneasy scruples and
disposes us to simple savagery. Whatever we laugh at, we condone,
and the echo of man’s malicious merriment rings pitilessly through
the centuries. Humour which has no scorn, wit which has no sting,
jests which have no victim, these are not the pleasantries which
have provoked mirth, or fed the comic sense of a conventionalized
rather than a civilized world. “Our being,” says Montaigne, “is
cemented with sickly qualities; and whoever should divest man of the
seeds of those qualities would destroy the fundamental conditions of
life.”

THE END

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